I have two piholes, and sometimes both will receive requests at the same time, if there’s a lot of traffic.
Comment on Noob question about PiHole
nul9o9@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’ve set my secondary DNS to cloudflare, and my pihole still blocked ads for me. I assumed the secondary DNS server is used only if the primary can’t be pinged. But i haven’t actually looked into it.
mateomaui@reddthat.com 9 months ago
Rootiest@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yeah this is what I do.
Putting Cloudflare as my secondary would allow some requests to get through and then often the device whose requests went to Cloudflare would continue using Cloudflare for a while.
The best solution I found was to run a second Pihole and use it as the secondary.
You can use something like orbital sync to keep them syncronized
mateomaui@reddthat.com 9 months ago
Pretty much. Not sure how the router determines which DNS to use, but mine seems to latch onto whichever one serves up results the fastest, which would inevitably be cloudflare direct when the pihole returns a block.
So I use a Raspberry Pi Zero W as a dedicated pihole, and my Pi 4 seedbox acts as its own pihole for torrents and as redundant backup when the Zero is rebooting or whatever. And then use gravity-sync from the Zero to the 4 to mirror the settings.
Rootiest@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Another cool trick is using tailscale to ensure your portable devices always can access your Pihole(s) from anywhere and then setting those tailscale addresses as your DNS servers in tailscale.
This way you can always use your DNS from anywhere, even on cell data or on public networks
AtariDump@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The ONLY DNS server you should have set on your network is a/the PiHole(s).
nul9o9@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Thanks for the clarification. I’ll be updating my settings.
rambos@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Afaik there is no primary and secondary, you cant tell which one to use. Its best to have 2 piholes, but having 2nd DNS set to nextdns or something like that should be fine if you cant run 2 instances, probably not the best setup tho